In recent years, the ability to acquire spectral information for a field of view has become desirable in photographic and spectroscopic applications. Such information can include a complete spectrum or just some spectral information at every location in an image plane. As such, spectral image sensors must be capable of obtaining a large amount of spatial information across a multitude of wavelengths in a field of view (“spatio-spectral information”).
Traditional spectral imaging sensing techniques scan adjacent zones of the underlying spectral scene and merge the results to construct a spectral data cube. A disadvantage of these techniques is that they require linearly scanning the number of zones in proportion to the desired spatial or spectral resolution. While compressive spectral imaging (CSI) techniques may limit the scanning requirements of traditional techniques, they may also undesirably increase the processing time required for obtaining useful spectral images. Accordingly, improved spectral image sensors and spectral image sensing techniques are desired.